Sunday, November 12, 2017

Like a lead balloon

The following graph comes from data from a Reuters-Ipsos poll asking about support for the Republican congressional tax reform plan. The poll has been running since mid-October, so the results are presumably mostly in response to the House plan rather than the one from the Senate, which came out last week (N = 4,390):

Inspiring.

The graph only shows "support" responses. The other two--"oppose" and "don't know"--are not shown. Thirty percent of the total population falls into the latter of the two responses that are not shown. If they were discounted, public opinion wouldn't look as bad as it does at first blush in the graph presented above.

It wouldn't look as bad, but it'd still look bad. Among those who either "support" or "oppose" among the total population, the plan gets 38.9% support to 61.1% opposition.

However it's presented, the odds of passage are long.

This would not appear to be a political hill worth dying on. Unless the intention was to ensure the Stupid Party moniker remained alive and well, that is.

23 comments:

Random Dude on the Internet
said...

If they couldn't get healthcare reform done, they sure as hell won't get tax reform done. I think tax reform that benefits the middle class at the expense of the upper class and modern day degeneracy is a good thing but the right people aren't in office yet in the numbers that it would take to get it done. Paul Ryan is an unabashed randroid and Mitch McConnell is a guy who only knows how to play ball with the donors. Neither of them have the competent leadership capabilities of delivering either health care reform or tax reform.

I guess the question is what effect this has for the normie base. I do not see a scenario where they throw up their hands and vote for Democrats - the guys who were responsible for Obamacare in the first place. Furthermore, the Democrats would have to embrace working class white talking points and I don't see that going over well with "New Americans." I think if the GOP is unable to get anything going on those fronts, they need to hit immigration hard. If they can't or won't push immigration, then I think the normie base stays home and the Democrats make gains overall. If the Democrats decided to ditch their brown and black base, then they could do some real damage but not with the leadership the DNC has hitched their wagons to.

It's looking like 2018 is going to be won by default by the party that shoots itself in the limbs less. My guess a year from is that turnout is going to be low (even by mid-term standards).

Issac,

Agree. There is a lot about it I like, but it just doesn't matter that much and it'll make the things that do that much harder to get. The tact should be to push something popular ahead of the mid-terms and make Democrats up for re-election own voting against it. This will do the opposite.

It's still worth voting for Republicans because they're voting in conservative justices (which help immensely over the long haul), and they're far less given to supporting Trump's impeachment.

What we need to be passionate about is getting in the most based candidates in the primaries as we can.

But I agree, the Republican Congress has been a huge disappointment. I'm sorry, but if you gave me seven years I would be able to present you a bill with superb reforms for the US healthcare system. There are good things about the tax cuts, but do we really need tax cuts (as opposed to tax reform) when GDP growth is fine and we're $20 trillion in debt?

If the cucks want to push tax reform, they're digging their own graves. But that doesn't mean they're digging OUR graves.

Our long term goal is still to burn the GOPe to the ground. Given the short term damage we KNOW they are doing (Obamacare?), I think it is a big leap of faith to tolerate a GOPe candidate just because he's more likely to approve a SCOTUS pick, especially considering that the smart money is on Trump winning in 2020 anyway.

The tax plan is like trying to run before you can walk. They couldn't even repeal Obamacare.

The good news is that while everything that happens between now and the midterms is fuel for Democrats, it's also fuel for MAGA Republicans. We don't own GOPe screw-ups, and every MAGA candidate should be hitting this point hard. Remember how alt-candidates got in by rallying to the Tea Party banner. MAGA >> Tea Party.

As US society experiences centripetal acceleration to the points of the compass and Congressmen continue to blindly stampede toward campaign donor demands, we see the impossibility of politics even feigning coherence.

Borrow-to-spend.Tax cuts for all.Swag for donors.Bread & Circuses for the monkeys.

Out of this incoherent mess, who expects order to emerge? From trannies in the bathroom to barely literate "college students," our society exhibits a level of collective schizophrenia that I find extremely difficult to even conceptualize. I'm not sure there's ever been a time when what common sense says could never work on a local/individual level is embraced as magically ideal when scaled up to the level of a 300 million person nation-state.

I wish I could say, "Not my circus, not my monkeys," but I live in the shadow of the Big Tent and its three ring spectacle.

The 2018 election will be characterized by either indifference (and the current trajectory remain unaffected) or a toss the incumbents-at-the-primary which will indicate that the next phase in the changing trend has begun.

In my opinion, the intermediate future should be characterized by additive symptoms of trend change. This will include:1. interest rate increases, meaning bond prices are collapsing.2. Stocks should roll over sometime soon (weeks or months.)3. Society will fragment far more visibly; rightists will win more and more local, state and federal elections, and eventually the pillars of Progressivism will be under legislative assault, setting up a war between lawmaking and the judiciary (the latter of which is the last part of politics to change.)4. People who believed they were promised (jobs, security, order, future cash flows) will be disappointed, and in their disappointment they'll become ENRAGED.5. Disorder at the margin (e.g., occasional rioting) will grow, but it will be quite some time before "fighting back full tilt" will rise. Watch video of the 1992 LA Riots; at no time did anyone do what seems most prudent, which was roll out with rifles and clear the streets of people who can still run by dropping anyone throwing stones and smashing cars.

tl;dr version: 2018 will signal either "stead as she goes" digging the hole deeper, or "more right input to the ship's wheel," evidence that the last 50 years are truly OVER.

I knew they had a tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory but somehow they manage to occasionally rouse their ancient bodies to pick up the ball on their opponents 3 yard line and sprint 97 yards in the opposite direction for a safety.

Trump needs to demand a Congressional leadership change soon or voters will take care of that.

I was at the nearest Costco lately, and this is in an area that was 94% native born white in the late 90's and maybe even early 2000's. I'd say the store was 80+% white, but I saw, in the space of about 1/2 an hour:

- Two women in Muslim garb (a mosque went up in my town about 5 years ago) as well their presumed family members- a (dot) Indian family- At least a couple Mestizos- At least two black couples- As far as I could tell, one white women with a mixed child- I heard a foreign couple, turned around, saw two apparent white faces. Didn't see or hear enough to make heads or tales of their nationality (it certainly didn't sound Teutonic or French).

This store is an a rather middle-middle class area with some admittedly prole-ish neighborhoods mostly built in the 80's and 90's. Naturally, the upper class suburbs of the Twin Cities are resisting the browning of America better than where I am. This county did vote Trump, as did almost every county in MN with the exceptions of Hennepin (MPLS) and Ramsey (ST. Paul) county, both of which have most of the state's non-white population as well as ur SWPLs. Back in the 90's, blacks were beginning to make inroads into some of the Northern suburbs, and an occasional Asian could be seen. But who knew that all manner of nationalities would be descending on so much of the heartland, back then?

I think for a long time we thought that various ethnic groups would stay in certain urban enclaves and that was that. But with gentrification and urban overcrowding showing no signs of letting up, well......We're getting a lot more diversity in the hinterlands now. Besides, with the vast numbers of people pouring into America, they've gotta live somewhere.....And that was eventually going to stretch far beyond California and NYC.

D.C. sunsets,you paint a bleak picture, one that unfortunately seems likely. Can you point to a similar time in history? I don't know if the fall of previous empire's match up. I thought we were a"Brave new world",but perhaps we're just jumped up monkeys repeating a very old cycle.

Yes, primarying them is the way to go. The more cuckservatives that can be scared away a la Flake and Corker, the better.

Dissident Right,

Exactly. Allegedly Ryan and McConnell want to get a tax bill passed by the end of the year, which will create a lot of frustration among MAGA voters who will then be able to express that frustration in primaries by voting against the GOPe critter that could pass a tax cut but not do a thing on health care, the National Question, etc.

dc.sunsets,

The political dissolution is coming in our lifetimes. The formal dissolution, that is. Informally, we're already almost there.

Dan,

Yeah, it's hard to conclude anything other than intentional sabotage of the Trump agenda.

"The political dissolution is coming in our lifetimes. The formal dissolution, that is. Informally, we're already almost there."

Our previous "healings" (which papered over insoluble problems related to geography and ethnicity), that took place in periods like Reconstruction (post-Civil War) and the 1980's (post-1960's/70's), happened with demographics that were 70-90% white. Note also that the introduction of blacks and non-Protestant whites intensified the various crises that we dealt with, and made the healing process more difficult.

I just don't foresee America, as it is currently demographically and regionally constituted, ever experiencing another "High" decade like the 1980's. To put things in perspective, in 1984 California and NY voted for Reagan. Many upper class whites in these states had some semblance of solidarity with prole whites back in the mid 80's; these days those elites are now contemptuous of prole whites. So it's not just the non-whites who are the issue. Still, demographics in some regions have become so unfavorable to us that it increasingly does not matter how white people vote in these places. And as soon as elite whites join the serfs, they'll begin to resent not having the same voice as they used, like us peons are already lamenting.

And yes, aging and sprawling empires always crumble. It's impossible to get that many different ethnic groups to cooperate in fealty to the same ruling class. Truth be told, we already were asking for it with blacks, expecting post-Civil War Northern whites and high-land white Southerners to subsidize an ethnic group (blacks) who were once entirely dependent on the whims of low-land South gentry whites.

Blacks, instead of appreciating what they have, instead are aggressively angry and demanding of whites, not to mention extremely envious of what most of them will never have. The hard feelings seem to be getting worse with each and every black generation. As the West inevitably degrades and weakens, I predict that Eastern leaders (be they Slavic/Baltic white or Asian) will eventually work up the nerve to offer refugee welcome to Westerners of the correct hue. And if open hostility emerges between the East and West, Russians can count on quite a few Western whites defecting.....Especially after several terms of Merkel/Obama type leaders who have no fucking clue what they are doing and will continue to gash open our wounds.

WRT intra tribal conflict, eventually some young generation will have grown up amid too much diversity, and will detest older leaders who push archaic and worthless ideas. It shouldn't be too tough to imagine that they'll say enough and force the exit of these dinosaurs. It's probably going to happen faster on the Left, who are out of power right now, but eventually the muh principles Rightist cucks will die along with the generations who produced them.

It shouldn't be too tough to imagine that they'll say enough and force the exit of these dinosaurs. It's probably going to happen faster on the Left, who are out of power right now, but eventually the muh principles Rightist cucks will die along with the generations who produced them.

For the last few days, Steve Sailer has been posting and commenting on articles written by POC authors, and they're nothing but antipathetic towards whites. There are none of the old calls for us to live together in peace while subsidizing poor ethnicities - they view white people as being their enemy and their problem, and they make no bones about it.

I have told some of my white normie friends that I feel absolutely no bonds of loyalty or association towards NFL players who kneel during the anthem. They might have their reasons for disrespecting our national symbols, but in doing so I feel no obligation to listen to or care about them. They have their own problems, and they're not my problems. Some of my normie friends disagree but they can't disprove how I am reacting to it.

The standard model of race relations in America, which became ascendant in the Civil Rights Era and culminated in the election of Barack Obama, is coming to an end. The Silents and the Boomers still believe in it, and maybe some of the early Xers hold to it, but in due time the majority of Americans won't believe in the old bargain we struck on the 60s or so. We will either strike a new bargain or else descend into increasingly Balkanized ethnic blocs.

My own preference is that we would pay lip service to equality, but in practice would take concrete actions to ensure we have a strong white majority in America, and see to it that the diversity rackets in our country close down. But that was something we should've been doing in the 90s. We're probably 25 years to late to embark on such a transition to a more duplicitous but realistic and orderly civic system.

Even so, the majority of my interactions with NAMs are civilized. Whatever people think behind closed doors, they rarely demonstrate open, blanket hostility to other ethnic groups out in the open. We still have a ways to fall.

Feryl,I evacuated home in Fl. To a small town in Ga.due to Irma.I found a town that was half black and half white and was one of the friendliest places I have ever visited. Nothing we see on msn or read and talk about on blog's like these seemed real. It was like an old movie from the 40's . I think perhaps there are alot of different America's out there, and we need to step out of our own echo chambers now and again. I generally agree with your point of view, and value you're thoughtfulness, I only bring this up because I may be guilty of seeing the world through my own lens to the detriment of seeing the big picture.

" The more cuckservatives that can be scared away a la Flake and Corker, the better."

These guys virtue-signaled their way to oblivion. But how many other GOP'ers remain who are ideologically out of step with Trump but for the most part don't advertise it? It's not like every conservative reads Breitbart to keep track of the biggest cucks. Oh, and McCain has been hated by most conservatives for years at this point, but he's still hung on. Many of his constituents are doddering and comfortable Silents and early Boomers, who got used to voting for McCain and apparently don't bother paying attention to what he's doing. According to a young white guy from Arizona who I heard complaining about this, the local media paints McCain as a glorious war hero and tireless do-gooder, and tries it's best to ignore whoever is challenging him in primaries.

",I evacuated home in Fl. To a small town in Ga.due to Irma.I found a town that was half black and half white and was one of the friendliest places I have ever visited."

Urban Northern blacks are horrendously socialized. And indeed, sprawling urban areas in general suck big-time, even under the most wholesome conditions. Midwestern white small towns and even Southern mixed race towns can be pleasant. But fughet about hanging around black neighborhoods in the urban Midwest and Northeast. No can do. Might as well wear a sign that says "Rob me". And the blacks of the suburban North are only somewhat more hospitable than the ghetto dwellers. A gradient in American sociology is that the best behaved whites attract the worst blacks. The Teutonic Midwest has fricking horrible blacks, and as "ethnic" whites back East have settled down, Northeastern blacks have gotten more uppity. Moreover, Yankee puritanism is about the worst thing you can have if you've got blacks; Yankees just make excuses for blacks and blame themselves and each other for how shitty the ghetto is. Down South, whites don't socialize blacks to be victims as much.

". The Silents and the Boomers still believe in it, and maybe some of the early Xers hold"

To be fair, if you were over the age of, what, 10, at the time Reagan delivered his Morning In America speech, just about anything probably seemed possible. People sometimes claim the 80's were a dark, forbidding decade, but overall that's absurd. There was spike in cynicism after the '87 Wall Street troubles and Iran-Contra, but even that didn't do much to dampen the mood. People were concerned about certain issues, yes, but Boomers felt better, more relaxed and cheerful, than they did in the 60's or 70's. By the 80's, Boomers had gotten just about everything they wanted with many Silents happy to serve as co-conspirators.

It's with people born in the later 70's that you start to sense a feeling that we never really had anything go our way, and the battles that were fought in the 50's-70's don't really matter to us and by this point we're sick and damn tired of hearing about Woodstock, bra burning, Kent State, 1960's assassinations, the Beatles, etc. I don't think conservative Boomers would object to this fatigue, either, though even a lot of conservative Boomers don't seem to have a....Visceral sense of distaste for the cultural (and thus eventually ethnic) transformation that's occurred under the watch of 3 generations (G.I.s, Silents, and Boomers), each of which pushes harder than the last and is more driven to snuff out dissenters. It's worth keeping mind that if you were born in the 40's, or 50's, or 60's, well, you got to have a lot fun before the culture really soured in the 90's, and demographic seizures began happening in earnest in the Sunbelt and urban areas. Not coincidentally, politics also started seizing up in the 90's, though this time the "war" was cold, as opposed to the fiery debates kicked up by the 60's. Neil Howe says that the 90's were a decade where "nothing happened" and people started feeling drained. It's this sentiment that really affected later X-ers and Millennials. Boomers and early X-ers got to take advantage of the greater opportunities (social, creative, financial) offered by the 50's-80's, which they've since coasted on.

" due time the majority of Americans won't believe in the old bargain we struck on the 60s or so. We will either strike a new bargain or else descend into increasingly Balkanized ethnic blocs."

This is along the lines of the 1960's, in terms of a new generation demanding a new way. The younger generations of that time felt that the G.I. culture of discipline and team-work were no longer necessary; we'd passed two tests with flying colors (the Depression and WW2), and it was time to start giving everyone more space and freedom...To do anything they damn well pleased whether their peers or, God forbid, their parents approved or not. The striver elements of Boomers, X-ers, and Millennials still are pushing this attitude, thus why the GOP is still fixated on cutting taxes. Cutting taxes=more for me. The populist elements of these generations wants multi-nationals to be reined in and wants greater measures of order (immigration control, drug control, affordable family formation, etc.) And we're willing to make sacrifices, unlike elites who resolutely do not want to give up their mansions, their vacation homes, their servants, their jet travel, their tax shelters, their suck-up media, etc.

Beyond all else, the passage of time has been an absolute disaster for the old consensus regarding race in America.

In the 1960s, it was easy to believe that racial disparities existed because blacks had been discriminated against for decades, after being slaves for decades before. Yes, Arthur Jensen shot that idea up in 1969 or so, but to the layman, it made sense blacks weren't doing well because the odds had been stacked against them.

In the 1980s, it still made sense, but as each decade has passed, the evidence brought to defend the orthdoxy has been tendentious at best and ludicrous at worst. By the time The Bell Curve was published, it should've been clear to the country that, no, for all the billions, maybe even trillions, we've spent on subsidizing blacks, they haven't been making much ground at all. The same evidence was there for most Hispanics too.

At this point in time, it's a complete joke that white Americans are the reason why blacks exhibit so much dysfunction. The reasons given for this point of view actually make me laugh. Oh no, there was redlining under FDR? Gee, it's not like we obliterated the economy a decade ago to expand minority home ownership!

Silents, Boomers, and the older Xers adhere to the old consensus because minds change less as people get older. But for everyone (white) born after the mid 70s, as you've stated, it should be clear that no, we're not going to increase black SAT scores with more after school programs. It may very well be the case that blacks need public assistance programs, but the price for that should be much, much stricter social standards against black misbehavior, and an understanding that only blacks and Indians (feather) can claim such entitlements. People right out of Guatemala and Pakistanis are certainly not entitled to them.

Tax reform is something that think tank Beltway Republicans care deeply about, Chamber of Commerce comfortable types are fond of but not fanatical about, and which the actual majority of Republican voters care not a fig.

It's political dissolution or the end of democracy as we understand it in the West today. Democracy just isn't going to work when whites fall to 50% of the electorate--a ways off now, though projections could change.

Wrt McCain, there is a niche for a few of these quisling media heroes, but there's not enough of a market for large numbers of them to make it work. A lot of congress critters are hollow men who try to balance donor money with voter demands the best they are able to. Trumpism can put pressure on the latter part of that equation.

Sid,

The only realistic chance of stopping the demographic transition is through a moratorium on immigration without any exceptions. That could appeal to enough SWPLs' sense of fairness to be plausible. Any other sort of serious immigration restriction won't cut it.

Mark,

What were the average ages of the residents? A lot of small town America is old.

It's political dissolution or the end of democracy as we understand it in the West today. Democracy just isn't going to work when whites fall to 50% of the electorate--a ways off now, though projections could change.

It's already failing, big time, in California. An economic calamity would render much of NYC (read: the darker skinned parts) a dystopian mess, ala what happened in the 70's and early 80's. Already, after several decades of declining crime and 30 of prosperity, liberal pols are placing greater restrictions on policing. What happens when you get liberalism with a broke city? Well, look what happened to the city the 40 years ago.

Texas has fairly stingy welfare policies, a ruthless approach to crime, and affordable family formation, so emotionally and culturally it attracts more wholesome vibrants than California or NY. But obviously, as whites become more scarce in TX, the state will inevitably decline. I certainly don't think we should overlook the importance of AFF; Western Europe and a lot of coastal North America have become horrendously expensive, and as such discourage the stability and wholesome values that are more common when many people are forming families. Most of the Midwest and South, and even quite a bit of the inland Northeast, ought to be able to hold up longer given that the East Coast and the Western US tend to be financially and/or logistically difficult places to live. Also with the Western US, you can't magically create a more wholesome and rooted culture in a place full of pioneers and ghost towns, but little sense of shared history among the current residents. Even the Ellis Island peoples in the Northeast can at least say that they've had family in the area for over 100 years at this point.

Due to high immigration levels, high numbers of transplants, and being highly developed, many areas of the US that were alright say, 30 or 40 years ago, are now inhospitable to prole and paleo whites. A lot of areas we currently regard as dystopian once voted for Reagan 33 years ago, and it's not just because those areas were whiter; 33 years ago a lot of Reagan voters in these areas were having families and wanted greater social stability; these days swpls bang on and on about the "wonders" of diversity.